


The Eight Beatitudes

by Myrrhee (Shadow_Logic)



Category: Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Genre: Afterlife, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-05-09 19:51:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14722538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadow_Logic/pseuds/Myrrhee
Summary: Alice and Uncas die on the cliffs.(And yet, sometimes, death is only the beginning).





	1. Arc I - The Lost Child: Prologue

Alice breathed.

She had breathed a few more times before the act shocked her. She was breathing, therefore she was alive – but that didn't make any sense, because she had walked off a cliff taller than the Tower of London mere seconds before.

The whistle of rushing wind and the green plumes of trees, growing ever larger as she looked, quickly returned to her mind, followed by what appeared to her a great sound like the crack of a musket, but there was no bridge in Alice's memories between then and now.

With a rush of anxiety, she opened her eyes. Around her, barely lit by the candlelight, was one of the corridors of Fort William Henry. Alice sat up, barely believing her senses, but there it was: the fort passage with its candles, flames crackling faintly as they consumed each wick. The log walls were uneven, the dirt floor heavy and compact. The heat pressed down into her as it had whenever she'd left her father's quarters, and the smell, of wax and earth and a strange compound scent with a note of brine and gunpowder, assaulted her nose.

She rose to her feet unsteadily, and realized there was no pain anywhere on her body. Not the pain of the fall, not the dull burning of her feet from walking, not the chafing of the rope that had hung from her wrist or the minute discomforts of the cuts and bruises she had endured.

A tremor ran through her. She existed, but she was not in any kind of pleasant place, and she was alone.

Alice Munro had never believed herself wicked enough to merit Hell. Not perfect, not saint-like, certainly not above reproach, but in her thoughts of death, which had been frequent indeed over the days after the George Road massacre, she had simply hoped to be with her mother, in a place of wide open spaces like Scotland.

Her heart constricted in sadness.

_And in this, as in all else, I have been wrong._


	2. Arc I: Poor of Spirit

Alice didn't know how long she stood, fingering the skirts of her dress over and over, the patch of silk flowers soft under her hands. She wondered if time mattered here, and resolved that it didn't. It awed her somewhat, how the dress (which appeared to be the very one she'd borrowed from Mrs. McCann) existed so simply, here alongside her, just as it had when she'd last been aware of it high on a cliff-side. The hem of the skirt was ringed with dirt and burs – expected and not.

 _What a strange place Hell is_ , she mused. There were no tormentor demons anywhere, no flames, no torture contraptions, no screams of the damned or any of the things she had imagined, distantly, whenever sermons turned to fire and brimstone and she'd edged closer to Cora in her terror.

There was no Cora here.

The thought conflicted her so profoundly, joy and sorrow and relief and pain, that Alice had taken a tentative step forward before she was aware she'd had, like she could leave behind the thoughts if only she left behind the spot of floor she'd had them in.

She could stay there, she realized. She could sit there in the candlelight and stare into the darkness before her forever, because mealtimes and day and night other people were, it seemed, for the living. And Alice was…

"Lost," she whispered, "I am lost. I am not simply dead, but lost as well." And that thought alone, that she was somewhere nobody would come to find her, made her feel colder and lonelier than anything ever had.

She could not stay. She had to  _move_. A thing could not stay lost if it found something else.

(Or, at least, that was the only thought she could bear).

Alice turned, nearly clipping her nose on the wall of logs behind her. This was a dead end, then, though she didn't remember any dead ends in the real Fort William Henry.

This left her no choice but forward.

With a tentative frontward lunge, Alice did exactly that, watching the quiet halls almost as much as she watched the tip of her hardy boots as her feet took her down the candlelit corridor.

* * *

Alice walked for a long time.

There were no adjacent corridors, no crossroads or rooms. There was just her corridor, its dirt floor and candles, the soft pat of her shoes against the compact earth, the whisper of her skirts, the crackle of flames.

Sooner rather than later, Alice began to feel frantic. It struck her that she might be walking the same loop of corridors over and over, and her chest tingled with fear and a deep sense of claustrophobia. She'd knelt then, drawing three lines with her fingers in the brightest path of light beneath the candles; the earth parted beneath her hand like powder. Even as her breath came quicker in panic, Alice went over the lines again and again.  _If I cross them again, I will **know**_.

And she had dashed down the corridors again, gasping more from panic than exhaustion of any kind.

But the lines had not reappeared.

Alice had put two fingers carefully on her tongue, then put them to the wick of one of the candles. Its death created a sliver of deep shadows in the hall and Alice had walked away from it, looking over her shoulder as the little alcove of darkness slowly hung further and further back. She had stopped when it disappeared in the distance.

 _I do not run in circles then, but walk a never ending hallway_. The thought was no less alarming, and Alice clasped the front of her dress tightly against the wave of distress. She felt as if a great weight settled over her shoulders and sagged under its heaviness, back slamming into the log wall to her right.

 _If I claw through these wooden walls_ , she thought with rising hysteria,  _will I find another hallway, and another and another like it?_

Perhaps this was her punishment, to be lost here for eternity. No need for torment or whips or flames: Alice would be her own jailer and torture master.

"Why?" With no space to fade away into, Alice felt as if the word had come out of her mouth to settle upon her, a lost moth from the closet.

 _Is there nobody to help me,_  Alice thought as the tears bloomed in her eyes, overflowing.  _Is there nobody to come find me?_

Then the arm that had supported her slipped. Floundering for a grip, Alice's hand suddenly found purchase…

…on a door frame.

Righting herself, Alice turned, and yes, there it was. Where before only solid wall had been, a small entryway had appeared. It had no door, nor the leather curtain she'd seen on the huts in the village where she'd seen Cora last. There was beyond it a darkness so tangible, Alice at first mistook it for black velvet drapes.

There was no other place for her, anywhere. She would go inside.

A slight tremor was at her fingers as Alice wrested one of the candles free. She wondered if the flowing wax would burn her, if she could catch fire. If, were that to happen, she would find there was some dark, quiet oblivion to escape into, beyond the overwhelming solitude of death.

_Is this why nonbeing is the heaven of atheists?_

After a moment of hesitation, Alice stepped through the doorway on trembling legs, the candle held aloft in front of her.

* * *

The candle was so small in this vast darkness. Alice half expected it to become swallowed by the shadows around her, but it held, and so she looked.

She turned in a slow circle: it was a room with no windows. She edged forward, and her meagre light fell on an elegant table and chairs of a high back. A few more steps in she saw empty candle brackets.

And then there was the back of a head with a powdered wig upon it, still as a dressmaker's form.

Alice balked, her breath catching, but the figure didn't move. It wore a red coat –

Recognition flooded her, and Alice leaped forward with a shout.

_"Papa!"_


	3. Arc I: Those Who Hunger And Thirst

Edmund Munro sat upon the edge of a table shoved near a corner of a room that had been his war room, full of his maps and his papers. It was the room they'd been ushered into the night they had arrived at Fort William Henry, Alice realized at last, only missing its dozens upon dozens of candles.

Tears blurred her sight for a moment. "Papa…"

The candle tumbled from her fingers, plunging the room into darkness, but she did not care for it, because she could have walked the distance between herself and her father by the pull of her heart alone. She clipped her hip hard on the corner of the table in her haste and realized there was pain here after all, but that hardly mattered. Nothing mattered but the first handful of rough cloth, the familiar scent of sweat and gunpowder and something strong like wooden furniture that had hung always about the man who'd soothed her nightmares by his presence alone. Alice buried her face into his familiar shoulder, her other hand going to his back, and for a precious instant was aware of nothing but the solid form at her side. Like a powerful old wives' charm, it seemed to Alice for a moment that the mere existence of Colonel Edmund Munro exorcised every last ill and horror from the room, even with the light still gone.

She would have stood there, would have let the tears of relief that now pooled at her eyes dampen the familiar sleeve for hours and hours…

…if only her father had moved but a fraction.

Alice raised her eyes. She noted, with shock, that a small amount of light now filtered into the room from some unknown source, soft as moonlight but…paler. Sadder. From a strange angle, not above her at all. It lit up her father's face, sending the lines at his eyes and the corners of his mouth into sharp relief. His blue eyes were wide open and staring unblinkingly at the wall before him, no, as if he could see through the wall and far beyond, and what he saw bewitched him.

And still he did not move.

"Papa. I'm here! I've found you!" Alice moved both hands to his shoulder, intending to turn him around. She pulled, worrying for a terrible moment that he'd resist, but her father swayed around obediently, slack arms shifting as if useless at his sides.

Slowly, he turned his head. He looked through her at first, then his mouth parted with difficulty. "Alice…"

Never had Edmund Munro spoken so softly, so unsurely. But it was recognition.

"Yes! Alice!" She affirmed the words, breathless.

Her father stared at her now, his eyes drifting over her face with just a touch of certainty. "What shall I do now lass…?"

"What?"

Her father raised a hand slowly, stiffly. He put it on her head, gentle fingers moving over her hair as if she were a hound puppy. "What shall I do now that the French have overrun us?"

"…what?"

"The French, my girl. The French."

Alice stared. "What French, Papa? What do you mean?" It might have been rather funny to her in life, in England, reading about ghosts who didn't know they were departed, but now all she knew was despair. "Papa," she licked her lips, discovered they could still chafe,  _sting_ , "there are…the French are gone." No further words came to her aid, and how could they?

Her father looked at her, and for a moment seemed more aware than ever he had. "Oh, I know that. I know that, Alice," and he took two faltering steps, then turned towards the table. The curious light bathed the tabletop, and she saw that on it lay a map: a large space drawn in the parchment with the label "Lake George", a series of little triangles labelled "G. Marquis de Montcalm". And diagonally, close to the lake, a square within another square, "Ft. William Henry". There was a great X splayed across it, the lines jagged and too thick, the ink so excessive it had formed dark pools in parts –

Alice only barely managed to not leap away, for it was not ink.

It was blood.

Her passion for the surgery and its labours never had matched Cora's (nobody, nowhere, could match Cora for sheer strength of will), but Alice knew as she knew her own name the consistency of fresh blood that made up the middle of the mark and the unmistakable, unforgettable red-brown of congealing blood that seemed to be forming where it met the parchment, before her very eyes.

( _And had I forgotten my lessons from Mr. Phelps_ , she thought, words racing through her mind at the speed of galloping horses,  _I would have never forgotten the texture and the scent of it, not after summer in the Americas_ ).

As she stared, her father huffed quietly, then reached to trace the white parchment, only narrowly avoiding the blood. "What shall I do now my girl. For the French have gotten through."

"Now…now you leave. With me." Alice gasped the last word, through the anguish making her throat rough.

"Leave," her father replied, not a question, "with you."

Edmund Munro turned then. His back, when he was on his feet, was curved into a hook of exhaustion, and he moved with the slowness of those who felt exhausted enough to collapse. Alice wondered if it was the light, or if those really were bags under his eyes, dark as bruises.

"Papa…"

"Alice, my Alice. The last person left who does not hate me," his eyes sharpened, focused, and he was the Edmund Munro who led armies, laying a hand firmly on her cheek, "I, who only cared for the French, can now only care for the French. Do you understand?  _There is no longer any escape_."

"Papa!" Alice called to him as if he were already going somewhere, for truly she understood, as quickly as if the truth had stood naked before her eyes.

 _This is your penance_.

For putting the interests of England above the welfare of his daughters, of his family, of the families of the men under him, English and American and Mohawk alike, Edmund Munro was to sit and care for the interests of England, as he'd strived single-mindedly to do in life.

"I have been a fool, my Alice. And I would not have dragged you and your sister along with me. And yet, you're here," his voice broke briefly, with a sob, and he closed his eyes without facing away, "was it the scout? Magua?"

Alice realized she didn't know how to answer. Magua had been there, yes. Magua had wielded a bloody knife, had extended ruby-red stained fingers towards her, but it hadn't been him, not him alone…

"I see it in your eyes," her father continued, his lips twisting into a rueful smile, "vengeance. For the children. It is done, then."

Alice had never heard words so sad and final, and the despair rising inside her found some words. "Cora lives. She lives, I know it!" Short of breath as she was, terrified and growing more terrified still, Alice nevertheless felt that to be true, even though the knowledge hadn't been there the second before that bit of intelligence left her lips. Cora lived, and was therefore to be apart from her, perhaps forever, but it filled Alice with a momentary warmth to know, with preternatural certainty, that Cora indeed lived.

Her father, however, looked at her in melancholy affection, like he had when she'd rambled on excitedly about impossible adventures as a child. "May that comfort you, my child. For me," he released her, and took a step back, "there is no more comfort to be had."

Before Alice could think to answer, to scream perhaps, or to cry, the light in her father's eyes dimmed, and his face, animated for a moment as it had been with the proud resignation of a particularly brave soldier before the firing squad, fell into listlessness. He turned around to face the wall, as when she'd come in, and became lost in his own thoughts. It seemed to Alice as if her father's soul receded, taking his presence from the room, even while his body was right there.

She felt suddenly, utterly alone.

* * *

A blink of an eye, or perhaps a small eternity later, Alice found herself in the hall again. For once, she didn't care how she'd left her father's war room, if her feet had moved, or if this miniscule world had simply shifted around her, for there was in her heart a sadness deeper and more sobering than she'd ever endured before. Perhaps this was the difference between sadness and despair, one sharp and punishing as a winter gale, one thick and poisonous, clouding the mind like opium was said to, from what she caught of terrorized whispers in sitting room conversation.

_This is my punishment then? To be here, with my father, and suffer his absence all the same?_

His absence… _his_  absence…

The words reverberated in her chest like a single bell clang, breaking the silence before dissipating over desolate hills. It cut through her despair, clenching at her heart until all Alice knew for a moment was the overwhelming anxiety of having very nearly remembered something…

_(But no. I mustn't. I **can't**.)_

...and the moment passed, as suddenly as it had come. Alice swallowed against the dry catch of her throat.

It had been like the half-remembered thought about Magua and the promontory as she'd spoken to her father. Somewhere inside her, rattled loose by death and tears, was a piece of precious information. A picture, a phrase, perhaps even a name with a face attached to it, which promised answers to questions Alice was no longer sure she wanted to ask. She had known that thing she'd lost, had held it in her hands, but now it had slipped through her fingers.

When Alice recovered, a new darkened doorway stood before her. A glance over her shoulder confirmed that it was not the one she'd left before for there was a door at her back. More convincing still, a rush of certainty told her that it wasn't: it was the same feeling that had filled her earlier, the one that told her that Cora was indeed alive, and now it told her that the door was new, even though the same impenetrable darkness hid the contents of the room beyond it. It also told her that she must go through it.

"Will you follow me down the hall if I ignore you? Will you dog my footsteps until I cave, and pass under your frame?"

There was no answer, and Alice wondered if perhaps it was because none was needed: perhaps this entire microcosm had already spoken to her, had been speaking to her since her arrival, and she had not known how to listen until now. She listened, and knew that a near magnetic attraction would urge her through the doorway before her, sooner rather than later.

Gathering her skirts in a white-knuckled grip and ignoring the faint stab of fear, an infantile one that urged her to take a candle with her, Alice stepped through the darkness once more.

* * *

Unlike her father's pitch dark war room, the place beyond the door frame suddenly appeared before her eyes, dimly illuminated, giving Alice the impression of having passed through a velvet curtain to reach it. Though she had gone neither up nor down in crossing the threshold (or at least so it seemed), Alice appeared in an area of the fort she had never seen before while she lived, and which she knew was located in its lowest level: the brig, where prisoners lay.

The place, which should have been terrifying, seemed unremarkable now, with its earthen floor and sparse lanterns, no dimmer than the hallway she had traversed. The door to each cell was flung open and the cells themselves lay empty, though Alice could not see into the cell far to her left.

But one thing quickly stood out to her as remarkable: the cells had  _windows_. And through the heavily barred little gaps Alice realized she could see outside, a faint luminousness of fires and moonlight.

Despite the vastness of the halls she'd long been trapped in, Outside still existed after all.

Hesitant now, after encountering so many things that were not as they appeared, Alice entered the nearest cell. She had crossed its floor in four short strides and reached out with trembling hands to wrap around the bars far sooner than she'd feared. The location of the brig meant that Alice should only be able to look at a sliver of the external ground level, and so it was: she could see the fort's parade, the tall walls and the base of a bastion, half-hidden in the shadows of nighttime. On the far wall, a faint patch of light shivered ever so slightly, the reflected light of a dying bonfire; no telltale crack of burning wood reached her ears, but Alice detected, faint and distant, the achingly familiar scent of it.

A pang of longing, sharp and desperate as thirst, hit Alice at the sight, and she lowered her head, striving to see more…

Perhaps the angle was not suited. Perhaps the walls were far too high. But Alice could not see even a sliver of sky, and her grip on the bars slowly eased as she turned away.

_It was as I thought. There is outside, yes…but there is no escape._

The brig seemed darker as Alice exited the cell that had briefly kindled her hopes, as if the lanterns had burned lower down, or the shadows had grown. As she followed the lines where the faint candlelight failed and disappeared, a prickling, soft then more evident, began in Alice's soul.

She was not alone. No sound of others had come to her ears during the brief stay, not even a glimpse, but the very air seemed suffused with the presence of another.

_Is this what our guides could sense in the forest that Cora and I could not?_

Then the air was forced from her lungs in shock as the prickling became articulate, indicating the final cell, the one set against the wall. The door was flung open as well, but with a clarity that seemed to come from her very bones, Alice knew it was not empty. Clear as a summer stream, the presence was. As was the notion that she needed to go towards it.

Her steps were careful and measured, loud in the subterranean silence. The light changed as she approached – the meager candlelight seemed to fade away, as if the cell weren't a few steps but set far into a tunnel from the rest.

A momentary stab of fear made her hands reach for the bars of the open door. It seemed unlikely that she could simply throw the door in the way of whatever lay in wait for her inside (for it was waiting for her, aware of her as she was aware of it), but Alice pretended she could, for courage. Her fingers were still curled tightly on the bars as she rounded on the open cell.

"Daughter of Munro," said the darkness in a low, emotionless voice.

Her mouth had formed the words, and the name had slipped out of her lips in a whisper before comprehension caught up with her.

" _Magua_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the accidental 3-4 month hiatus! Regularly scheduled updates will pick up now. To those still reading, thank you for your patience.


	4. Arc I: Lion and Lamb, Part 1

Magua sat on the bare earth floor in perfect stillness, legs crossed in the peculiar Indian way. Though he wore the elaborate trappings and paint that seemed to mark him a Huron captain, as Nathaniel Poe had said he was, his head was tilted downwards in a defeated fashion that it never would have had in life, not even when he masqueraded as a lowly scout.

And – Alice gasped – he was covered in blood.

Smears that seemed to bear the whorls of handprints covered his arms and went down his chest, across the bare skin and past his clothing, where her eyes could not see. His hands, which lay open at his thighs, were soaked to the wrist in telltale red-black, and even the folds of his mantle seemed to be drenched in it. The parts of the cloth that would have hung about Magua when he stood lay instead in a haphazard mass around him, the floor beneath turned into a veritable abattoir.

His eyes didn't move to Alice's, but words came from him. "Daughter of Munro." He said it, Alice knew, in his guttural language, but she  _understood_. Her lips parted in a soundless gasp: she could not even tell one word from the other in Magua's tongue, but it was as if his greeting had transformed into English as it touched her ear.

"Magua." Dimly, Alice realized she had never said his name out loud before, even though its bearer had appeared in her nightmares often as she sought escape in sleep.

The silence hung heavy between them for a long, long time, until Alice ventured more words: "You lived when I last saw you."

"And now I do not," he answered simply. One of his hands moved to his knee, and Alice saw it trail a few slow-moving, dark tendrils of blood as it passed.

Belatedly, Alice was struck with her own rudeness, then felt wrong-footed (what was etiquette and manners when one was already dead?) and finally the absurdity of her situation dawned on her: she was standing before her would-be murderer, both dead, her a mass of sharp emotions, him unreadable as ever he had been. And she was concerned with the social mores of the situation.

She would have laughed, if only she were not so afraid.

It was not the fear Alice was familiar with, for while she lived she'd feared for her life, and that was forfeit. She was afraid of Magua's irrational hatred, his anger, as if either of them were a vapour, perhaps a living entity still capable of hurting whatever was left of her. Of damning her further.

A tired sigh drew her attention to the man on the floor once again. "Daughter of Munro…why are you here?"

Though she had never known it until that moment, the answer slipped into Alice's mind, like the right word sometimes had during her French examinations. Back then, her mind had sometimes turned worrisomely blank in terror for only a second before the word she needed magically surfaced. As it had then, an answer surfaced for her now: "You. You called me."

Mirthless chuckles shook Magua's shoulders at that, and he finally looked up. His eyes…every time Alice had looked at him in life, Magua's eyes had been empty, impenetrable as bits of polished jet – now they glowed, and Alice could barely read the contents of them from the sheer multitude of things…

Anger, little of it compared to how it had dominated his eyes on the other side of life…disappointment…but, she realized with a jolt of surprise, Magua was not in anguish. And he was not angry at  _her_.

"I have called you?" Exhaustion and yes, there it was: resignation. If there was suffering, Magua had accepted it so thoroughly that a peculiar, hopeless peace seemed to fill him, overflowing to pervade even the air around him.

"You have."

Magua held her gaze for a moment, half-formed thoughts flitting into his eyes and his face too fast for Alice to grasp them. Then his head lowered slowly, until his chin touched his bare chest. "I…have found the death of your father…and the death of the officer…and your death…all the death…is not enough."

Alice gasped, but before she'd willed her feet to move, Magua lifted his head and the naked regret in it doused her terror like a kick of sand into a fire.

"You misunderstand, Daughter of Munro. I do not thirst for more blood. No." A terrible parody of a smile appeared on his lips, like a prelude to a sob, "on the contrary… I find myself…drowning in it." Here he raised his open hands: the palms glistened with blood. An unexpected sorrow clenched at Alice's heart, ( _it had been his blood on the Huron captain's hand when last she saw him, him…who? The thought slipped away_ ), but as she stared, Magua made a fist with his left. A track of blood extended from the fist in a steady, slow stream. Magua did not move, and the line did not slow.

The idea came slowly to Alice. "You not are wounded…?"

"No. But I have wounded. And killed."

Alice understood, and the horror of what she suddenly knew made her grasp for the door once more. Her eyes returned to the lengthening thread of blood that seemed to pour, never-ending, from Magua's clenched fist.

Desirous as he'd been to bathe in the blood of his enemies in life, Magua now bathed in the blood of everyone who'd died by his hand in death. Everyone, the guilty and the innocent alike, clinging to his skin forever.

She should have felt vindication. This man had betrayed a British company, had brought about the death of Duncan, of herself. But the anger and rage that should have come seemed to hold themselves off to the sides as Alice studied the man still crouched in front of her.

"Why?"

Magua's gaze rose, past the door and past Alice, to fix eyes on the ceiling. Alice followed his gaze unthinkingly and looked at the unfinished wooden beams that crossed overhead.

"Many moons ago, Grey Hair came to my village with his men, the British mingling with the Mohawk in the dark. They came in the night, in silence, while we were unprepared, and slaughtered many. Men, women and children alike fell to the musket fire. My children were killed."

The idea would have been preposterous to Alice, once upon a time. She would have once been gripped by all-consuming rage at the implication that her father would make war upon women and children; he was perhaps too deeply absorbed in the idea of duty, perhaps woefully unaware of what shapes war took in the Americas, but not women and children.  _Never_ women and children. And of course, if any woman or child had died at the hands of his men, the old Alice would have argued that he had probably relinquished command, and his appointed man was the monster.

But now…

Alice wet her lips, breathing hard through the grief battering against her senses. Was it hers, or was it Magua's? It seemed to her that no single person could contain such pain. "And…then…"

"I was taken prisoner by the Mohawk, and made a slave. I worked the menial tasks of the enslaved in silence, feeding the fires of my wrath, until one day I was welcomed as a Mohawk myself and walked free. I wanted nothing then, but to return home..." Magua's words tapered off into a pained gasp. "But when I returned to my village, the woman who had been my wife had believed me dead, and taken another man for her companion." The proud head lowered again, chin to his chest. "I had nothing. Nothing, except my wrath and the memory of a man with ash-grey hair who spoke English with a strange growl to his words." Magua's eyes sought hers for an instant, but Alice had to look away.

The rest of the story was excruciatingly easy to imagine. Alice didn't know how many years stood between the night of the raid, the night of Magua's return and the summer morning when she, Duncan and Cora had met a man with a sunken face and terrible dead eyes outside the Patroon's house, but it didn't matter. Rage and the image of Edmund Munro were all Magua had, and so he'd pursued both with his particular, single-minded intensity, as if each injury and insult had happened but the day before.

Silence hung between them once again. "But then…why am I here, then."

"I do not know," Magua said, softly and unsurely. "I have wondered if the Creator has sent you to me so that I might, perhaps, express my regret."

"And do you? Regret it."

A heartbeat. Then: " _Yes_." The word was strangled, as if it had escaped from the very depths of Magua.

Alice believed him.

Magua must have misinterpreted her silence, for he sat up straighter, searching for her eyes. "I do not ask for your forgiveness, Daughter of Munro. I believe it is not the key to my freedom…and I believe it is not in my place to demand it of you." Magua raised one of his blood-drenched fingers to the level of his eyes, rubbing thumb and forefinger dispassionately, "…perhaps this is the place where I must stay, for now."

"What?"

Magua gave her another smile-that-was-not-a-smile, one that stretched his sunken face in irony for a moment, but said nothing.

Alice looked away from the rapidly disappearing expression on Magua's lips in time to catch a fleeting memory: a dark chapel in London, her side pressed to Cora's in the morning chill, and the exhortation  _we choose our own hells_  ringing out over the pews and breaking against the vaulted ceilings. But it had been said in condemnation then – she could hardly imagine the priest having foreseen that an American heathen would one day choose his own hell, believing it to be justice.

* * *

They stayed silent for what felt like a long time after that.

Alice's feelings ebbed and flowed: for a moment she basked in the silence and the soothing simplicity of not being completely alone, of having one more real, tangible human being close at hand. Then the memory of musket blasts and screams returned her to the George Road ambush and her peace left her, replaced by reproach and guilt at having no qualms at sitting in silence with a man who murdered. She gazed at Magua each time her thoughts circled so, trying to summon vitriol, or at least recover her erstwhile fear, but the man in front of her seemed now as harmless as if he'd been chained to the opposite wall.

Then she'd lose her train of thought, her mind going to some gray mist beyond, and she'd reach a despondent tranquility quite like the one of the man in front of her for the instants it took her wayward thoughts to find the road back into pain again.

* * *

"You are alone."

Alice returned abruptly from her reverie, barely aware of where her mind had been. "Pardon?" She'd fallen to a crouch and then into a sitting position close to the door, her skirts arranged around her with some semblance of propriety. She had been comfortable, so much that she thought of how much longer she might have lingered, lost in a daydream, at the door of Magua's cell if he had not spoken.  _I might have stayed forever._

"You are alone here," Magua insisted, as if there were something unusual about it.

"Yes."

"I had thought…after the promontory…" he trailed off ineffectively, as if the rest were evident to Alice.

Of course, it wasn't. "I am afraid I do not understand." The words had the odd taste of lies, but Alice couldn't quite put her finger on  _why_.

Magua seemed to not understand either, looking at her with lowered brows, as if he meant to pry the truth from her. Then his eyes softened and his jaw loosened, hands resting more heavily on his knees than before. "You do not remember."

Alice didn't answer. As before, the near painful brush of a memory she couldn't seize darted into her mind and then out, before she could make sense of it.

Magua's expression remained lax. It was pity, Alice knew, but she had been pitied so much and so often over the course of her short life that to have a little more of it now, even from the man who had threatened her life, seemed but natural. Then a hint of resolve firmed the man's lips, and a single word came to her ears: " _Him_."

Alice trembled, as if shaken by a distant warning bell. Something would happen if she crossed that last line in the sand, something momentous. It was no longer in her hands to avoid it, to stop Magua, it would hurt…

…but she would recovered another missing fragment of her life. Surely she could endure the pain for that. Surely to know was not worse than not to know.

Alice forced the word out in a whisper. "Who?"

"The boy. The younger son of Chief Chingachgook."

Alice gasped…

…and in a rush that barreled through her mind with the intensity of a damned river breaking free, the memories came.

A man, tall and long-haired, loosing her mare and her sister's with a slap and a shout.

Two firm arms around her in the dark, one quieting her breathing, the other a heavy band about her middle, and half atop her back the warm line of a body suffused in the scent of crushed vegetation and gunpowder. With her gasping breaths muffled, Alice could almost hear the sound of feet displacing the tall grass ahead of her, but her wildly beating heart soon settled under the weight of the arms around her. It was improper, but it was necessary, and it was  _safe_.

Finally, with a clarity that made Alice wonder how she ever had forgotten, a voice like distant thunder rang out in her mind. It had been low as a whisper at times, raised in a desperate shout other times, but its depth was dear to her in a way that caught at her insides. More telling still, even now as Alice sat with a man damned at the end of all things, something in her lightened at the thought of it.

"Uncas."

And the flames of the candles seemed to flicker, the air seemed less oppressive, as the memory of her silent, gentle sentry returned to Alice Munro at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is coming in *minutes*. Again I apologize for the long wait - postgraduate studies are terrifically time-consuming. Still, I think I've hit my pace, and updates will be once a week again now, this time for REAL.


	5. Arc I: Lion and Lamb, Part 2

Alice careened backwards as if thrown from a horse, bracing her arms on the earth floor. Nothing would have prepared her for the rush of sight and sound that came with the restoration of a mental void, powerful as a mighty shove.

"Uncas...yes, that was his name. The Bounding Elk."

Belatedly she remembered Magua. Righting herself, Alice went to answer – and the sight Magua's bloodied hands struck her anew.

 _His_  blood. His  _blood_. Magua had extended a hand drenched in  _Uncas'_  blood to her on the promontory, meant for her to take his bloodied hand and step away from the edge. In a rush, Alice remembered the last time she and Uncas had exchanged a look, remembered the ribbon of half-congealed blood that trickled out of his nose and the way his strong jaw had clenched in determination, even as Alice had been moved nearly to tears at his futile courage. He had leaped upon Magua a second later, and that was the last time his eyes had met hers.

The anger that had eluded her for so long finally found her, and Alice saw red. "You…!" Alice found her feet and hauled herself up by the bars of the door. "You  _killed_  him!"

"He challenged me. I would have had to have been born a different man to refuse." Magua was not happy, not proud as he said what he said, but Alice didn't care.

"You  _knew_  he had little involvement in your quest for vengeance!"

"You and your sister  _were_  my vengeance, Daughter of Munro. Nathaniel Poe rescued your sister: that loss, I was forced to accept, though it made my heart bitter. Then his younger brother appeared, intending to take you too, against the ruling of our sachem. I had to battle the boy. The man I was then would have fought the British Army entire for a chance to erase at least part of the seed of Edmund Munro from the world."

Alice's chest constricted in rage. "I remember your knife. Like an animal after the hunt you stabbed him, again and again before slitting his throat." She took a step towards him. "You could have simply slit his throat, and yet you pushed him into the abyss as he died."  _You ensured he passed on alone and scared, for the paltry crime of protecting a helpless, silly girl._

The scene played out behind Alice's eyes, each detail sharp and fresh as a new painting: she saw Uncas, struggling against the Huron captain's arm with the last of his defiant strength, and then came a horrific gurgling, gasping sound as both their backs turned to her. Then Magua had opened his arms and his captive tipped over the edge of his own accord, strength and lifeblood alike spent. The last Alice had ever seen of Uncas was the brief wave his long hair as it was picked up by the wind of that final, fell drop.

Tears filled her eyes, too many to dash away before they overflowed and cut a path down her cheeks. To see Magua prone before her, calm and yes, even regretful, only sharpened the sense of loss in her chest, for it meant there was nobody left to fight. Alice was only half aware of herself as she rushed out of the cell, moving blindly towards the wall of the brig and reaching out with her hands; she wondered for an entire delirious second if perhaps clawing through the rough wood might quench the darkling fire that spread through her veins.

She stood there, held up only by the wall, as her breathing steadied.

She wanted to turn around and damn Magua, hurt him, deny him any semblance of hope or comfort. But what for? All those things had already happened –

And Alice faltered, realizing with clarity that she had just experienced the true, irresistible pull of vengeance.

The realization robbed her rage of its fire.

* * *

It was with heavy steps that Alice returned to the dimly lit cell. Magua sat as he had when she'd left, cross-legged and mournful, though his eyes flicked upwards as she approached.

Alice stood before him for a moment, diminutive stature towering over him only because of his prone position.

How easy it would have been to commit to hating him. To reach out and cup in both hands the fierce emotions clamoring at her to hurt as she had been hurt.

But Alice knew now that there was no need. And now, blood settled, she also knew that each and every one of them had chosen, step by step, the path that had led them onto the narrow mountain pass where all their lives were forfeit.

Cora had chosen to travel. Alice had chosen to follow her. Magua had chosen to fight. Uncas had chosen to fight, and to die.

Alice collapsed in a heap, her sobs so desperate she hardly believed they were truly coming from her.

_I miss Cora. I miss Papa. I miss Scotland and pain and breathing and **living**  and Uncas…_

* * *

Her tears must have stopped at some point, because eventually there was silence again, and Magua was speaking.

"Your corpse fell at his feet. I had believed…"

Alice could only gasp through her tear-sore throat. "No. I…I lost him…" a high keening like the cry of a wounded animal escaped her throat. She had lost him. She had awoken alone in the place where she had come to lose everything, trapped in eternity with her father's absence and their murderer in the suffocation and the candlelight.

Magua cleared his throat peremptorily. "He is not." For the first time, his voice held the conviction of the man he had been in life.

His certainty did not convince Alice. "But…how could you possibly know?"

"Because you are here." Sensing her doubt, Magua continued, "the boy, Uncas…he followed you to Fort William Henry, then to the Great Falls, then to my village and finally to the promontory where my men and I were to make way to the Huron of the Lakes. He came alone, though he had his father and his brother at his heels, and threw himself into the way of my knife and tomahawk, even when he realized victory was impossible."

"Uncas was brave."

"Yes. As…" Magua swallowed, "as were you, Daughter of Munro. Alice."

Alice would have laughed at the sheer irony, but Magua's entire body seemed to straighten. It confused her. "But…"

"The boy met his death with the courage of a warrior, yes," Magua conceded, shifting in his seat, "and then there was you, Alice Munro. You did not know if your sister lived, but assumed, as she was in the arms of Nathaniel Poe when last you met; you did not know your father was dead. You cannot have doubted that they would try to rescue you. And yet, you looked over the edge of that mountain pass and then looked back at me with the first sign of emotion there had been in your eyes since the night behind the falls. You looked at me, not as a child in fear, but as a warrior that has chosen her path. And you followed him."

She had. Alice had known upon waking in this hellish replica of William Henry that she had fallen, chosen to fall, but the reason behind the jump had hidden away along with Uncas himself. "I…" she could not say, even now, why she had jumped. It was only that she knew, as soon as Uncas vanished over the edge, that the only logical course of action was to follow.

Magua, meanwhile, looked at her with wide eyes and a solemn tilt of the mouth. "If you are here, Alice Munro, then he is here. For not just anyone follows another into death…" and Alice watched in awe as Magua the killer's voice broke with emotion. His gaze lowered, fleeing from hers.

 _Are you thinking of your wife, passionate Magua? Has nobody ever followed you into death?_  Alice gave the man before her time to compose himself. "Then...it is your belief that I will find him."

"No," he said, and Alice faltered, but then, "I believe that you will find him, and that he will find you. Your feet will follow him as they followed him in life, and his will follow you, until you meet at the middle. It cannot be another way."

Then, tentatively at first, then with abandon, the first real smile she had ever seen blossomed upon Magua's face. Above it, his brutal eyes softened yet again, and Alice finally saw the deep, shattering sorrow that had nurtured his anger through the long years.

And so it happened that murderer and victim sat together, one comforting the other in sincerity, the other being comforted.

A sense of finality swept over Alice after a moment: it was time to go. She  _needed_  to go. "Then…then I will have to begin walking, so that might feet may find their way."

Smile gone, but eyes still naked with emotion, Magua gave her a single nod. "May the Creator give you guidance, Alice Munro."

Alice returned the nod, rising with dignity, as if she hadn't stormed out of the cell in a flurry of skirts and tears earlier. She straightened her skirts nervously before turning to leave.

She paused with one foot past the threshold, turning minutely to look at the man behind her. She had been given her leave, and she'd taken it: she was free to go. Even Magua seemed to consider their conversation finished, his entire posture reflective and absorbed once more. But there was something, soft as a fluttering moth, loose in her heart that bid her stay for a moment.

"Magua." She heard a shuffling of fabric, and knew she was being looked at. "I wish you peace, Magua." Alice turned to face him fully.  _I cannot forgive you yet_.  _But…_ "I wish that you may find peace."

Her words seem to break over Magua as the ocean's waves: at first he simply stared at her, uncomprehending. Then they washed over him, their meaning coming clear, and he gasped. His eyes widened and it was a sight…something like joy in the face of her killer. Wide, confused,  _living_  eyes sought hers, but before any more words were exchanged, every light in the room went off at once, and darkness consumed everything.

* * *

When Alice's awareness returned, she was once more out in the narrow fort hallway. The door behind her was gone.

 _And so is Magua._ Alice wondered if they would ever cross paths again.  _If it is so, it will not be here_.

If only her father's salvation were hers to give…

…but there was little time to be spared for more pointless suffering, even the seemingly infinite time she had now, because she had to find him.

Alice picked up her skirts, walking down the hall with determination. Instead of her mad run for an exit, as it had been at the start, Alice walked faster, then broke into a run, eyes fixed on the walls to either side of her for a new doorway, an opening, a way for her to follow.

Candles in brackets and wooden walls met her eyes. Incensed, Alice ran harder, willing the preternatural awareness that had led her to Magua to return and guide her. She stopped abruptly after a moment, then raised her eyes to the wooden beams above as her chest heaved.

"You've shown me the way to my father, and to my killer," Alice demanded to the void, "will you not show me the way to him now? Will you not let me find him?"

Nothing changed. The silence seemed to mock her - and Alice was tired of being a cosmic joke.

In a burst of wrathful determination, Alice turned to the walls at the side of the passage and grasped at the intertwined logs, pulling and clawing and willing them to move.  _If there is no way for me, then I shall make a way_ , she thought fiercely, even as her fingers slipped on the log.  _I will tear down this fortress beam by beam, trunk for trunk_. It was the least she could do, the very least, for he who had laid down his life for her and expected nothing in return - she had until now simply followed. Now, she would meet him halfway.

A crash sounded in the distance and Alice leaped away, fearing she had moved some fundamental part of the hellish fort's construction and the roof would collapse upon her. When nothing happened, she turned to see that the hallway had  _changed_. Far into the wooden horizon, where before only candles and earthen floor stretched as far as the eye could see, Alice saw the unmistakable black of a doorway, not at the sides, but at the end.

Blue black darkness. Light, different from candlelight. Movement.  _The outside world_.

Alice picked up her skirts and ran.

As the candles and the wall rushed past her, Alice feared for a terrible moment that perhaps this was another illusion. Perhaps she would run and run forever, the tantalizing sliver leading to the outside world moving further away from her as she ran. On the feet of the word "tantalizing" came a memory of the myth of Tantalus, and never had the punishment seemed crueler.

But even as she wondered, Alice seemed to pick up an uncanny burst of speed – or perhaps the hallway began to shorten itself faster beneath her feet – and it seemed that mere seconds had passed when she finally barreled through the doorway into the half-light beyond.

Cold assaulted her skin – the cold of frost, and Alice barely made note of feathery white particles falling around her ( _Snow, lord almighty!_ ) before the intuitive feeling returned, at last.

 _He was there_. Near or far, she could not tell, but he was  _there_.

"Uncas..." the name fell from her lips without strength. Alice took another breath of bracing, cold air (how different it tasted, how keenly she'd missed it), and raised her voice: "Uncas!"

For a long, terrible moment there was nothing but the silence of winter and the gasps from Alice's tired body. In the dim light, not unlike moonlight, she made out the dense forest of New York, leafless trees now standing less than a quarter of a mile from the walls of the fort instead of waving at it from across a lake.

Then, after a small eternity had gone by, she finally heard it: a soft crunch-crunch of running footsteps, near soundless.  _Brave, light-footed hunter, even in death_.

"Alice…"

Alice turned. And barely contained a strangled cry as a tall figure she feared she would never see again appeared from the deep shadows.

Perhaps she ran. Perhaps he did. Alice could not tell, and when after a moment of confusion her small frame collided with his larger one, nearly throwing him off his feet, nothing mattered. Nothing, but the way Uncas' long hair swept across her cheek from the sharp movement, and the way his arms threw themselves about her shoulders without any of the hesitance he'd have attempted in life.


	6. Arc II - The Bounding Elk: Wakan Tanka

"Great Spirit, Maker of All Life. A warrior goes to you swift and straight as an arrow shot into the sun."

_(Uncas would have never believed Chingachgook's voice could be so small, so crippled from sadness.)_

"Welcome him and let him take his place at the council fire of my people. He is Uncas, my son."

_(His voice almost broke on the name and, in the peaceful slumber of the half-dream he lay in, Uncas' heart shattered along with it.)_

"Tell them to be patient and ask death for speed; for they are all there but one - I, Chingachgook - Last of the Mohicans."

_My father. Nathaniel. I have failed you._

* * *

Awareness rushed over Uncas, all at once like the first light of dawn spilling over the mountains. He breathed in once, drinking in moist soil and the scent he liked to call coldness; for a moment he took in the solid reality of earth beneath his back, as if it held him.

He opened his eyes. He gazed into a night sky, the clouds crowding about it dark and heavy with menace, and thought  _it will snow soon_.

And then he sat up in surprise, because Uncas had closed his eyes for the last time in a world fully awakened to the throes of summer.

One by one, scenes from his journey's final leg returned to his memory: he had left his father behind for a mad dash up the steep slopes of a promontory. He remembered being breathless, pressed into a narrow alcove in the rock, as he waited for the steps of a scout to grow louder. A knife across his ribs. Across his throat. And then the cruel whistle of the wind, the green-and-gray earth beneath him flickering in and out of sight as the cold of blood loss seized him. Uncas would never know if the fall or the wide gash across his throat had been the one to kill him.

It didn't matter either way, he acknowledged after a moment, as the outcome would be the same. He had left the world far before his time, left behind his father and Nathaniel, abandoned his duty to settle and raise a brood of children, so that the line of Chingachgook would perhaps one day flourish again.

His father was now the last of the Mohican people who had refused to flee for Pennsylvania and Stockbridge. He had failed.

Uncas ran a hand across his throat without thinking. What he found was to be expected, as there was no pain, but he probed the area above his shirt's neck nevertheless, finding clean, unbroken skin at every point.

A memory came forth on the feet of that sensation, one of dark green eyes, wide and horrified, but it was like a dozen sharp rocks dragging across his chest. Uncas forced the memory away with determination. Some things didn't bear thinking anymore.

_(Not when life and death rose between them, impassable as vast canyons, or maybe as deep, quiet, deadly rivers, with no crossing for leagues and leagues. If there was a death beyond death, the pain if this regret might just take him there.)_

For lack of anything else to do, Uncas glanced at his surroundings. The clearing he woke in couldn't have been more than a few steps long on each side. The trees that rose around him were think and dark, not a single dead leaf clinging to their branches.  _This forest is already asleep, waiting for snow._

With his life behind him, a bright point in a distant horizon, and this inexplicable forest stretching around him like the vast water of the ocean must surround ships, Uncas felt his heart go raw and wounded. But as it had been in life, when his head and his chest filled to bursting, his legs became eager. Uncas stood: he took two steps to measure the ground beneath his feet, two faster ones to choose a direction, finally two running ones, and then he was  _le cerf agile_ , with no concern but with the cold wind and the hard, dead earth beneath the soles of his moccasins.

Beneath the familiar release of running, Uncas was aware of little things that should not be (the way his keen sense of direction did not kick in to guide him; how, even with for the trees and terrain hinted to him that he was in New York, no true recognition came; the unnatural silence of a forest empty of animals for leagues; the way a soft light like moonlight lit his path, even though no moon ever broke through the clouds). They clenched at his heart, and Uncas urged his feet on a little faster.

He was dead, he was lost and he was alone, but he still had the spirit of the elk in his run.

* * *

There was someone – or something - coming.

Uncas slowed to a stop, skin prickling. He couldn't tell how long or how far he'd run, not under a sky that didn't seem to change and an empty forest that didn't seem to end (the thought saddened him, but he didn't despair at the idea), but with profound clarity, he knew that something was there that hadn't been before. No sounds broke the dense silence, but he trusted his other senses as much as he did his sight and his ears: someone or something was coming.

Before long, steps finally reached his ears. A person with heavy shoes, taking no care at all to be quiet, crushing leaves and twigs underfoot. With the mindlessness of long practice, Uncas reached for his belt and felt his hand close over air: he had no tomahawk. Something dangerously close to fear brushed ice-cold talons at his chest. The steps were unhurried, as if his mysterious stalker were out for a pleasant stroll, but that only set Uncas at a greater unease.

With a  _hush-hush_  of crushed forest debris, a figure appeared to his left: it was a man dressed in brown, walking with his head down. Uncas was unsettled for a moment at the strangeness of suddenly finding another human being, before the broad forehead and thick auburn hair, threatening to recede a little already, drew from him an audible gasp.

The man tramped closer a little more without slowing or looking up, though he must have heard Uncas gasping in the silence as clearly as if he'd yelled. His steps were short and sharp. Two long tendrils of his hair hung at each side of his face. Ten steps from Uncas he paused, straightened with a faint "ah" of relief at relaxing his spine, and smiled.

"Hallo there, Uncas."

" _John_   _Cameron_."

And in a leap worthy of a deer, Uncas cleared the distance between them in a single step and grabbed John Cameron's forearm, reaching for his back with the other to clap him on the back. John smelled of wood smoke and cooking venison and a hint of summer; hand pressed to his back as it was, Uncas felt the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

John Cameron, breathing and solid. Whole and alive, though alive was not the right word for it. A tremor went down Uncas' spine, and he closed his eyes tightly in mingled despair and relief.

He felt John Cameron's shoulders shake as he chuckled. "Easy there, boy."

Uncas took a step back, but didn't remove his hand from John's forearm. "The last time I saw you..."

"The cabin, after the war party left?" John's eyes went soft and sympathetic, "A sorry sight, that. But I'm whole now. Nothing aches, nothing hurts."

Uncas remembered a tiny body, stiff and still beneath a fallen beam. "And James-"

"He's alright, left his with his mama and sister. We're alright. Nothing can happen to us on this side." John Cameron's kind face turned wistful, and he put a hand to his friend's shoulder, "it shouldn't have happened. But it's over now."

Uncas carefully released a breath. Was he relieved? He could tell that the weight that lay over his chest had eased – but only a little. He was glad to have John Cameron in front of him, glad to hear his voice again, but beneath it all ran a thin stream of deep sorrow, reminding him that it shouldn't have been this way, that they should have had years. That John's hair should have had the chance to turn grey, then white, then retreat towards the back of his head before met here.

As if he could hear his thoughts, John Cameron sighed, "Nobody should leave the world before they're old and grey, Uncas. I'm not saying what happened to us – to my family, to you – is good or fair, just because we're here now. But we can't go back. We can only move forward and seize whatever joy we might find here. Just like we did in the frontier."

The thought was strange, stranger still with how John expressed it so surely. "And what's forward here?"

"Don't rightly know. I  _do_  know though that you ought to look for your way."

Uncas looked at him with puzzlement. "My way?" At John's nod, Uncas only frowned more. "Have you and your family been living here?"

John's mouth twisted. "No, we haven't. This place… this ain't exactly a pleasure retreat, Uncas."

Stories of being taken before the presence of ancestors, of a council fire and a welcome, returned to Uncas slowly: this wasn't what he'd been told he'd find upon dying. John Cameron was the first person he'd seen for as long as his run had lasted.

"Where is this?"

"Don't know. I was told you'd end up here, on account of how you died."

"Violently?"

"No. Desperately. Full of frustration over leaving, over what you left undone on the other side."

Uncas lowered his head. Oddly, he didn't feel curious about who or what had spoken to John about him. Perhaps they were spirit guides. Perhaps they were ancestors. Perhaps they were the angels as he'd learned of them from the Moravian priest-teachers of his childhood. Perhaps, perhaps: he didn't know. In his heart of hearts, he didn't want to know; he had hoped for a life after life of forests and familiar faces. Now... "I'm trapped."

"No, no", soothed John, in a tone that reminded Uncas of the one he'd used on his own children. Then a small smile lifted his friend's lips. "It's…well…as far as an uneducated man who mostly read his Psalms knows…you're here for a reason. You'll be able to get out if you do what you need to do."

Loss, like a physical wound, blossomed in Uncas' heart. A yearning more desperate than hunger or thirst or even physical passion needled at him, threatening to double him over, and then vanished without warning.  _Was this why I ran? Are my feet aware of my path?_ "Where do I go?"

"I couldn't tell you that far."

John's words made Uncas feel lonely. The vast, empty forest had been peaceful to him as he ran, leaving his thoughts in the dust behind him, but the thought of carrying on alone now that he'd had the company of a friend he'd feared he'd never see again was unexpectedly sad.

The words were out before Uncas had properly considered them. "I'd like to see James. And Lucy. And Alexandria." They were the words of a lost little boy.

"You will Uncas, I promise." John said earnestly, "Don't say it like I'm going to leave you behind! I won't."

"You can stay?"

"All the way," answered John Cameron with conviction. "Nobody forced me to find you, Uncas. And time here runs funny. I knew I'd see you sooner rather than later, 'xcept sooner and later are all bent, and it makes waiting less hard. But when I realized you'd crossed over, I knew I wanted to walk with you. And I came."

The knot in his stomach, which he never realized was there until this moment, loosened: John Cameron was, after dying and crossing over into a strange world, the same man who'd proclaimed to a British lieutenant that he'd stay on his farm and promised to take in every woman and child whose husband or father left to fight the French.

They were still themselves. If death had no power to rob them of that…

A peaceful emotion, a shade too sad to be happiness, came over Uncas like a blanket on a cold day. He stepped away from John Cameron to sweep the forest with his eyes again, until a pinprick of rightness told him to stop. In life, that rightness indicated the north: in death, Uncas would have to hope it marked the path to something, anything, that might solve his situation.

"There." He pointed with a nod of his head.

"Lead the way, Uncas. I'll be right behind you."

It was when John's louder, less graceful steps joined the softer pad of his own that Uncas realized how painfully he missed his brother and his father. Nathaniel's steps were soundless, his father's movements wisely measured to spend as little energy as he could; it was bitter to know he'd be without them for as long as their lives lasted, worse still to think that to wish them here was to ask for their deaths.

So he braced himself and ran faster, remembering John's earlier words. _I will seize whatever joy I might find here. Just like I did in the frontier._

_I can still run. I have the woods, the trees. I will endure._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Now, our story folds back, to overlap with the beginning of Alice's tale. Don't worry. We'll catch up soon!_


	7. Arc II: Wendigo's Legs

For a long time, a time he couldn't track, Uncas' mind belonged to the run.

The run was many things: the returned hit of his feet against the ground, the cold wind cutting at his face, at his cheeks and lips, pulling his hair back. The dead trees, the silent forest, and the constant feeling that guided him (almost like the sense of direction he'd developed over years of hunting and trapping, but with the slightest difference in pitch) leading him in a line that was anything but straight. He could hear John Cameron's footsteps behind him, out of pace with his, heavier than his.

His steps did not falter. But beneath the freedom of the run, bittersweet and bracing, an undercurrent of thoughts whispered at Uncas like a babbling brook.

He thought of Nathaniel's daredevil laughter, of the easy, welcome weight of his father's gaze on his back. Their steps always matched when they ran, each falling into the rhythm of the other no matter how long the march, or how cruel the terrain. He remembered the burn of a long day's trail on the soles of his feet and missed it fiercely – there would be no exhaustion here, if the stories held true. The memory of other small pains returned: the earned ache of a hard day's toil, the not-quite burn of a slice of meat, hot from roasting over the fire, on the pads of his fingers and the not-quite sting as he soothed them in his mouth, tasty fat running over his tongue. All the things that had made him mortal and alive; all the things he would never have again.

He remembered, without quite understanding why, the face of Mamèthakemu, the quiet girl who would linger by the winter fire after storytelling was done, when his family and all their distant relations huddled around the flames at some cousin's wikwam in the camps of the Lenape. She had wide eyes and sweeping eyebrows, which made her gaze as sad as the song of the bird she was named after. Small but strong-looking, she had always lingered, very still, moving her head slightly only when Uncas spoke. It was not hard to notice, as his words were very scarce when in company, and Uncas was quick to understand why.

Nathaniel had noticed too, of course, and he'd teased his younger brother mercilessly. To hear Nathaniel speak it, Uncas had broken copious hearts, east, south and west, and now his "broad shoulders" had claimed another innocent victim. "But she is so quiet," Nathaniel would say in mock contemplation, "perhaps she is the one who will make you settle."

It  _had_  crossed Uncas' mind sometimes. It would have been easy to catch the young woman's gaze, to blink at her in acknowledgement when she looked. He would have made a point to cross her path often, once the bitterest part of the season eased. Perhaps a word spared when the men left to ice fish, a lingering glance over a story. They would have come to an agreement by spring, and if the Master of Life were kind, the first of his dark-eyed children would have come squalling into the world by the next winter.

But the way Nathaniel's jokes glanced off him harmlessly were enough to warn him that any union between them would be duty and duty alone. That was what had always stayed his hand. Despite the good-natured prods of his cousins, despite the occasional surprise from concerned friends like Alexandria Cameron, Uncas had put off thoughts of making a home time and time again, hoping and waiting, wishing for something else…

…and on the feet of that thought came an impression of golden hair. Uncas nearly missed a step.

_Alice._

Where was she now? His father and Nathaniel would have perhaps caught up with the war party by now. With Magua. Brash Nathaniel would not be the best of opponents for that cold, cruel dagger, no; it would have been his father, their father, to take on Magua. Perhaps he'd finally dispatched the Huron war captain. Perhaps they had bargained for Alice's life.

Thoughts with a darker tint made their way in: Perhaps, caught up in grief, they had let the party slip away, and Magua had vanished into the north, Alice gone with him. Perhaps they were not to be found before something, anything, everything terrible befell her. Terror and rage, vicious and angry as storm winds, began to pick up in that remote part of Uncas' mind that was not consumed by the run.

But all those were concerns for the living. To think them now, powerless and far away, was to court madness.  _No_ , Uncas stated firmly into his mind, the inner storm coming to a halt. No. His family had weather too many greater storms, worse ones, to simply fall to their knees before a tiny band of Hurons. They would have collected Alice. The Munro sisters would be together, and now Nathaniel would be free to marry Cora Munro. And, perhaps, grieve for him. Grieve as he grieved now for them.

Disorientation woke him from his memories. He seemed to have ended up in yet another patch of trees, different from all the ones he'd passed before but still frustratingly nowhere – and yet, like a fish cut loose from its line, or maybe a canoe breaking loose from its tether, the pull of purpose had vanished.

"What's wrong?"

Uncas turned, giving John Cameron a bewildered look, which John responded to with a nod. John looked around, craning his neck as if it would somehow give him further clues. Uncas remembered the affectation from watching him survey his own small field of crops.

Uncas swept a foot over the dark, dead earth out of habit, though he knew no tracks would become uncovered by the light brush of his moccasins. "The trail just stops here."

John Cameron shrugged. "Then maybe here is where the shindig's at."

 _But where is "here", and what am I supposed to see?_  Uncas crouched down, letting his eyes wander over the ground. No signs of animals. No footprints. No sound but the overloud stomping of John behind him. He looked up over the skeletal tree tops, then further up to the sky. The clouds hadn't moved in the slightest, bloated with a promise of snow.

_(That was the color of the skin. White, gold-white in the sun, rose-white in exhaustion. Pale, snow-white the last time I saw her, a knife cut across my chest...)_

A white shape, two-legged and fast, darted him, at the very edge of his eyes.

Uncas turned sharply, intending to follow it, but it was gone as swiftly as it had appeared. He turned this way and that, startled, but he saw nothing else, even though the winter naked trees were thin and the surroundings so decidedly black and ash-grey, he should have been able to see the apparition.

"What happened, Uncas?"

"Didn't you see…?"

John Cameron looked around in confusion, clearly having neither seen nor heard a thing, and Uncas closed his eyes tight against the rising disquiet. He rose to his feet and turned slowly around the small clearing, missing his knife and his musket more sorely than before. Had the shape been a trick of his mind? But no. As he revolved, keen hunter's senses came to life once more, and a telltale prickling came over his skin. There were eyes on them. They were, perhaps, being hunted.

The silence seemed pregnant with something. Uncas held his breath.

Several things happened at once. Behind him, a sound like the  _whuff_  of a heavy blanket being laid over a bed, only much louder, sent a small gust of air over his back. John cursed. A rapid stomping told Uncas he had broken into a run. "Uncas!"

Uncas turned, arms up to confront...

...only to find a tree behind him, a tree that had not been there before, blocking the sight of his friend. He rose to his feet and made to dart around it, only to catch the briefest glimpse of John Cameron's face before another tree appeared in front of them, sudden as a door being closed in his face.

Uncas half turned and prepared to run out the other way, but managed only to catch more long, grayish shadows in the act of closing in around him. Moving like regimented English militiamen, the trees were closing ranks between himself and the bewildered John Cameron, swift and noiseless but for the fabric-like  _whuff_.

"Uncas!  _Uncas!_ " Through his bewilderment, Uncas caught the ever present thread of courage in John's voice. "Keep your wits about you!"

"John!" Uncas' fingernails glanced uselessly off the dead wood, his other hand groping reflexively for a tomahawk that would never be there again. A sound like falling branches made him duck and cover his head, but only displaced air brushed over his forearms.

When the muted hushing sounds were over, Uncas uncovered his face and raised eyes. Branches had woven together seamlessly above his head. Not even a hair's breath of space lay between the trunks in front of him. The trees had formed a cocoon around him, floor to ceiling. The quiet and the lack of echo told Uncas' senses he was inside a small space, but the cold air and the way the walls of trees that should have been a few steps away became swallowed in darkness confused him. It turned a place that shouldn't have been much larger than a wikwam into a grotto.

Uncas turned back to the wall behind him. A probing touch with his palm assured him it was as solid as the stone wall of a chimney, another scratch of too short fingernails revealed not even a splinter could be raised from the compact logs.

_I could still try. I could slam into this wall, shoulder to arm, until it broke, or until I broke._

And he would have tried, if only to convince himself that he could not, if a moth wing of a sound, too faint to tell from a voice, a dead sound or a breath, hadn't reached his ears from the other side of the shadows.

Uncas turned slowly. As his eyes grew used to the darkness, he realized there really were no walls besides the one now at his back. The cavern of trees stretched out further than his eyes could see.

The sound returned, just a little louder.

_Uncas…_

Pained, breathless. Genderless. But it was calling for him.

"John?" Uncas tried, but even as he shouted it, he could tell that his voice couldn't get through to the man on the other side. His only choice was to go forward.

* * *

From his memory of the clearing, Uncas had believed he would reach the other side of the cavern in five steps. Forty steps later, he had found neither wall nor tree nor exit. The space should have been pitch black, but Uncas could see many steps ahead, as if there were a dim candle tucked away just out of sight. This bewildering cavern was possessed by some strange magic, one that Uncas couldn't quite call benign.

Walking unarmed through open ground made all his sense and reason screech at him of ambushes and danger as if he weren't dead. It would have been comical, if it hadn't been so very sad at its core.  _But there might be things worse than death_ , he mused, fireside stories of the Kanontsistonties, the insatiable disembodied heads that hunted for human blood for eternity, running through his mind unbidden.  _Still, if I were going to turn into a monster, I would have lingered in the world of the living…_

_"Uncas…"_

The whisper came from the right. Uncas turned sharply, again finding nothing. But there was movement, a breath perhaps, to the left, and Uncas turned again, his skin prickling in warning.

There seemed to be nothing there at first. But as he watched, something slowly coalesced out of the darkness, as if the being had decided to assemble itself from the cold, sharp air a moment after Uncas had looked. A long shape straightened out from the shadows: it bloomed into a human torso, with a suggestion of arms and breasts and a head, wrapped from head to toe in cloth. It was a dusty grey brown, thinned see-through in parts, neither French nor English, nor the workmanship of any tribe. Uncas decided that it looked as if nature had produced it.

Arms elongated and lifted towards the head stiffly. Cloth-swathed hands scrabbled at the place where the face should be, clawing the cloth away. The figure's head bent for a moment, hands wiping at the face. Then she straightened, and Uncas stared in mingled shock and horror at the pale, impassive face of Mamèthakemu.

"You…"

Mamèthakemu said nothing. Uncas was not as well acquainted with her face as he was with that of his brother, his father's, even those of his Lenape cousins whom he saw once or twice each year, but it appeared just as it did in his memories of the last winter. And yet, with how her hair was hidden beneath the cloth, the rest of her body wrapped to indistinctiveness, the length of fabric began to make Uncas think of a funeral shroud. And Mamèthakemu's face, the one part of the ensemble that looked human, made his mind return to the Kanontsistonties again.

"Why are you here?"

She said nothing. The girl he remembered was very quiet, but the being wearing her face in front of him was rock-like. She didn't even blink.

"I regret your passing, Mamèthakemu." Wrongness filled Uncas at his own words, lingering on the part about passing, but Uncas quickly buried the train of thought in favor of keeping an eye on the being in front of him.

The sound of her name seemed to finally make her stir, eyes blinking and body shifting. The movements were slight, in fits and starts, but her entire demeanor seemed just the slightest bit odd to Uncas. Had this little wisp of smoke ever appeared so at ease in her skin? Had she always had the strange, brazen gaze?  _Perhaps this is what she looked like, when I wasn't looking_. A stab of remorse pierced his heart.

Mamèthakemu's slight form paused for a moment before turning on her heel. She took a few steps before she seemed to realize Uncas was not following and turned, gazing at him with eloquence.

 _Walk with me_ , she seemed to say.  _Come with me_.

What else could Uncas do but follow her?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After my brave words all these months ago, my cellphone was stolen. The thief not only took precious pictures and videos, but the Evernote app containing, amongst other priceless things, chapter five of my story  **Leaves, Trodden Black** , LOTM research, and the rough draft of what would become [Petrichor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16916526). I was sad, I was angry, and while I had to redo my Yuletide fiction or break my recipient's heart, rebuilding everything else from nothing was hard. Thank you to those who were patient, and particularly to those who said you believed I would finish. I do not do well with disbelief, but belief and hope? Those are my lifeblood.


	8. Arc II: Moskim's Courage

_Where are we going?_

_Why are you here?_

_Why do I follow you without question? Is it the guilt of never having done so in life? Step after step, and I don't even try to walk away._

_Do you mean to help me?_

The figure didn't turn. A disquieting thought came to him from the deep silence.  _Perhaps…do you mean to hurt me?_ They had overheard a man from the South at a trading post once, speaking with the matter-of-fact blandness of those who have escaped death a hundred times over, of things he called will-o-the-wisps, lights that seemed to come from lanterns, luring travelers to their death in deep bogs.

Again the silent figure didn't turn, which struck Uncas as stranger yet, because his eyes on her back were sharp now. Sharp as they'd been on a distant summer night, when a small battalion had burst into the Mohawk barracks and taken his brother away in chains. Uncas would have burst through their midst with his fists alone. But fists were no good here _._

 _I should turn back and run. I can't fight._ Defenselessness did not sit well with Uncas, not when he'd carried a knife at his belt since he was a child. But something, a calm silence from deep inside his heart, made him trust every step he took by her side.

 _Uncas_ …

So faint, as if it came from far away. He realized he'd looked away from her at some point, and looked up. The be-robed woman had taken a few steps ahead and had turned to face him, expression still and unreadable, one arm pointing towards the darkness. As Uncas blinked in that direction, the darkness eased just a little, and a long outline appeared: a doorway, he realized. A doorless, hinge-less frame standing in the middle of nowhere, as if it had once been on a house, before the entire thing burned down and only the pointless skeleton of a doorway remained. The Cameron house had had one.

Mamèthakemu didn't move, but Uncas felt a tug of something in his chest. The sense of rightness had returned, and it was urging him over the threshold. His feet only hesitated for a moment as he passed the silent Mamèthakemu, pointing and staring as if at something far away.

He felt, for a very brief moment, like a child playing pretend, because the other side of the endless room was visible as he edged the tip of his foot through the doorway, but then Uncas was in thick darkness, as if he were crossing under the leather apron of a wikwam, and then he was slipping through to the other side.

* * *

Uncas was in a small room bathed in moonlight (though where it came from, he could not tell) and strange dark shadows. A moment later, he realized he stood in a room thoroughly invaded by the lower parts of a tree, for the shadows were leafless branches and thick, knotty roots. They stretched across, from wall to wall (and there Uncas loosened his shoulders in relief: walls he could see, to his left and to his right, even though the back of the room lengthened far out of his sight), like a hand, ancient and too-many-fingered, reaching out…

 _To block my way, because I feel the path goes to the other side of this room_ , Uncas thought. He sighed, even as he felt the pull of his odd new sense, coaxing his feet forward.

The twisted, gnarled branches and roots made for a hard going. Uncas had to climb, or drag himself over the ground, stomach to the dirt; he sometimes believed the spaces were getting ever smaller, and that he'd become stuck or lost in these narrow spaces forever. Hard as the going became, slow as his going could get, Uncas pressed on.

The trail stopped under the cover of a mass of arched roots, the ground bare underneath them. Uncas had to crouch low to sit himself there, the soil cold and moist against his buckskins.

It looked dark and rich, fresh as a newly turned field waiting for grain. His family's wandering life meant that Uncas had never had to work a field for himself, but he'd helped with the fields of others enough to deeply appreciate good earth. He aknowledged an idle, practical thought about planting (a pointless thought here)...

...and then a momentary glint of something made him reach out, fingers digging into the soft soil before he could think any better of it. His hand brushed something hard. Uncas passed his palm several more times before the tip of something, buried just below the surface, finally came into view.

Using both hands to dig, Uncas uncovered the handle of a knife. A familiar, well-worn handle he had not expected to see again. He pulled it out of the ground with care, though the soil parted with it without resistance.

_My knife._

There it was, under the slight smatter of dirt, still in the familiar woven sheath tipped in red, still worn smooth at the handle, so much that it seemed to Uncas, once he'd wrapped a hand around it, that the knife clasped back in greeting. A warm swell of relief rose in his heart at not being quite as helpless…

...and then a sharp metallic scent suffused the tiny space. Uncas looked down to the disturbed earth, where a miniscule red-black wellspring rose from the hole that had just recently housed his knife. Blood.

Uncas nearly forgot the low roots above his head in his haste to move away.  _Why?_  Caught by a strange thought, Uncas wrenched his knife free of its sheath: the blade was clean, and so was the buckskin sheath it rested in. He breathed harder, unable to understand what was happening, but knowing somewhere deep in his bones that the blood was a message for him.

_My knife. A spring of blood. My knife…I am a killer. Is that the matter?_

It was the life he knew, to kill or be killed. The harsh law of the frontier, particularly true for three red-skins who wandered far away from the protective embrace of a camp or a village. Red-skins and heathens, the sharp rock in the shoe of the British, of the French, of every last force bent on dominating the Americas. There was little choice in the matter.

The blood slowed, creating a dark, still little pool that didn't seep through the earth as it should. For the first time in a long time, Uncas let himself think of a world where he did not have to anticipate a fight for his life and that of his loved ones just round the next bend of the forest roads. What was the difference between the hunter and the warrior? He had been both, turning into one and then the other in an instant, but could it be that he was a hunter at his core? A man who killed for sustenance alone was not like a man who found his fire in the heat of battle. His gift had been the speed of the elk after all; Nathaniel's, in contrast, had been deadly aim. A warrior's gift.

Was he unhappy over the lives he had taken? He would not have regretted Magua. He did not regret the men struck down during the assault on the survivors of Fort William Henry, as Nathaniel rushed to Cora's side. But there were other deaths. There were the men they'd killed for the canoe that took them across Lake George. There were bluecoats and couriers des bois, throats cut in the dead of night for safety's sake.

A warrior understood death in a way different from that of a hunter. Perhaps…perhaps, if the times were different, Uncas would have never been the kind of person to raise a knife or musket at another person. Perhaps his life, with its joys and its warmth, had chipped away at a bit of his soul that Uncas, though it cost him some effort to admit, would not have wanted to part with..

 _And this I knew, somehow, even if it only came to my thoughts in the dead of night_. Sadness clouded his heart. He was slowly clambering out from between the roots and branches, far and away from the pool of blood (whose?) before he'd fully realized that his feet were calling him somewhere else.

It was only a few steps later, weaving through the maze again, that he realized he had tucked his knife, with the thoughtlessness of long practice, in its place at the front of his belt. Uncas was honest enough with himself to admit that he would have done it, even if the hilt had been tainted with blood.

* * *

The next patch of earth at which Uncas paused was harder, drier, like the earth in high mountain land where no homesteads would prosper. Uncas saw no hint of what might be hiding beneath it this time. He searched, simply because he believed there might be something to find.

A little deeper that time, his hand closed over thick weave: more digging and pulling yielded his father's woven belt. Black and brown, familiar in his hands, bearing the history of the Mahican people.

The shock of seeing it there, between his hands, made him forget to look out for more unpleasant surprises. As the eldest, Nathaniel had carried the belt, cinched across his chest with pride, and Uncas had been glad to see it there. It was a proclamation to the world, that his brother, pale and blue-eyed though he was, was a Mahican and a son of Chingachgook in all the ways that mattered.

Uncas knew then that what he held was not the real belt – the real one would still be across Nathaniel's chest back in the life he had known. _You're here for a reason, just like my knife was_ , Uncas thought, running it through his fingers pensively. He glanced at the disturbed earth from where he'd taken it, but no blood emerged. He sank into thought, still moving the belt mechanically through his fingers. Nathaniel, the firstborn. Uncas, the trueborn. Chingachgook, the last warchief who resisted…

A thought finally dislodged itself from some deep, dark part of his heart where he rarely ventured. Frustration. Exhaustion. Even…envy. Envy of Nathaniel. Uncas let out a short, pained breath.

His brother's blood had given rise to a hundred different reactions in others over the years: distaste, distrust, even blatant outrage, back when he was small, scruffy and angry as a wolf cub. Uncas couldn't remember, but Chingachgook had mentioned hiding from British companies, worried they might think he'd stolen Nathaniel from his family. Once or twice some officious Lenape mother had glanced at pale Nathaniel and wondered aloud if he'd live through the next winter.

But Nathaniel had grown, and his musket had become legendary. His cheerfully disparaging manner endeared him to many and infuriated others; nobody could have a lukewarm thought about him. His cutting comments and brazen, devil-may-care manner had gotten them into more than one mess over the years, but everyone  _everywhere_  remembered Nathaniel Poe very well once they'd met him.

And then, there was Uncas.

Uncas was quiet like his father, taller than many of the tribesmen he had met. But that, as far as many of their distant kin told it, was all that could be said for him. He was an untried youth who had already began to upset custom by staying alone and childless past his twentieth summer. The judging eyes of all who remembered the stalwart Mahican war chiefs that came before him often found Uncas too lost to his own thoughts, too abstracted from the world – when they managed to see him, that is, wrapped in his silence as he was. A warrior by need only, not a fighter by nature. Not like Chigachgook's adopted son, fiery and warlike.

Nathaniel had all the boons of being Chingachgook's son and none of the burdens – he could live as he pleased. Uncas had his days of freedom portioned out for him from the moment Chigachgook's village went up in flames. Uncas had felt the unequal weight in small, stolen moments of unwelcome clarity. It would be lies to say he wasn't affected by the difference. And for a moment, the realization threatened to sink him, somewhere deeper and darker than death.

 _No_.

It rang like a musket shot through the dark, forcing Uncas to raise his head.  _No…what?_  A memory of his brother's carefree grin, a sure hand at his shoulder.  _No…whatever the world may have put in our path, still Nathaniel was my brother. Is my brother._

The words rang true, shaking Uncas of his lethargy. Yes…Nathaniel was his brother. If Uncas had his way, he would have run the forests with his brother and father forever - at least, until Chingachgook left the world. Then it would have been just him and Nathaniel, aging under the Americas' bright, bloody sun. Now that this simple, bright future could not be his, Uncas nevertheless loved his brother still. When the time came and they met again, here or some other, kinder place in this life beyond life, Uncas knew how he would greet the older, likely crabbier Nathaniel: with a raised hand, a gentle smile, and a simple, firm  _netohcon_. Older brother. Because despite his wistful thoughts, Uncas loved Nathaniel. And he knew his brother loved him.

Uncas was only barely aware of drawing up his knees, slouching forward and touching the belt to his forehead. He had loved Nathaniel. He had loved his father. They had never said the words to each other, but Uncas couldn't remember a single time when he'd doubted that simple truth; their actions had spoken loud enough.

The realization strengthened him. Whatever their circumstances, whatever lay deeply buried in his heart, that truth remained untainted.

He rose to his feet in a single, careful movement. His feet began to itch with the promise of movement, even as he sought another opening amidst the branches and roots, and Uncas took a step. He opened his hands before taking the second, watching as the woven belt record slithered to the ground like a snake –

\- before something about it shifted, darkening and coiling, and suddenly it was not a woven belt record but a chain of heavy, metal links. Uncas had never seen its like often, not outside of forts and garrisons – or, lately, around his own brother's wrists. It lay by his feet, black and heavy as a curse, and Uncas was slightly surprised it did not move to catch him.

He did not pause to ponder what might have happened if he'd somehow found in himself the urge to take it with him, but slowly made his way towards the next clearing.

* * *

The next clearing was covered in rocks, like the bed of a river.

Uncas knelt amongst them, frowning. He was less surprised than…concerned by what this particular patch of earth would yield for him. A thought hidden so deeply would without a doubt bring him no joy.

He loosed one of the rocks closest to him and went to feel the ground beneath. It was hard, dry and dead, which surprised him. He'd half expected dark, wet river soil.

 _Sooner begun is sooner done_. Uncas could not remember which side of his curious upbringing had given him that phrase, if it was a distant Mahican relation, dead before Uncas could remember their face, a kindly Lenape encouragement, a word of wisdom from the Moravian missionaries, but never had it struck him as clever and appropriate as it did at that moment.

* * *

His fingers had turned tired and clumsy from repetition when he shifted a rock to finally find a hint of something.

It was not like the two times before, no. The pale handle of his knife and the earth tones of the belt-that-wasn't blended neatly with the half-darkness, blue, white, grey and black. The thing peeking slightly from beneath a rock was brightly colored, jarring: like some fragile creature ailing beneath the weight of its prison, a length of pink ribbon peeked and vanished from underneath one of the rocks Uncas had yet to shift. Uncas knew that once he held it up to the light, it would have the bright glow of new silk, and it would feel soft against his fingers.

He didn't want to touch it. His hand withdrew rebelliously and clasped his shirt before Uncas was properly aware of what he was doing. He didn't want to touch it…but he had to. He eased a hand out, fingers outstretched. An instant before the pads of his fingers touched it, Uncas closed his eyes.

The first time he had seen the ribbon, well and truly seen it, he'd been bringing up the rear of the most unusual party he'd been part of yet: his brother, his father, a loud British militiaman, a dark-eyed woman with a hint of steel in the lines of her back…and a girl.

A frightened, moon-colored little girl who'd narrowly escaped death by ambush. Uncas had expected her to be loud or reluctant, even angry at them – he had expected her outrage at the loss of the horses. His surprise began when she didn't take offense at Uncas touching her (he had been prepared for her to beat at his chest with shocked anger, for example). She had assumed Uncas spoke English from the first, unlike Heyward. And then she had sunk into a tired, compliant silence, despite the length of the walk and their uncomfortable clothes.

The ribbon had been braided into the girl's yellow-gold hair as she turned, staring at the tumbling water of the falls to their left with an innocent, patient awe that had taken Uncas aback. She'd turned back to her sister after…well, Uncas couldn't remember. The scene must have lasted a breath or two, but sometimes it seemed to him that it had lasted days. A thousand summers.

Uncas opened his eyes, which became fixed immediately on the length of pink silk. What was there to say of Alice? He had found her strange, but not unpleasantly so. Mild.  _Kind_. She should not have become a trading good in Magua's quest of revenge. He regretted dying, but he could not regret having gone after her, even though he could acknowledge that a quiet, secret part of him had tried – tried to regret her, tried to blame her, even. But Uncas knew better.

He had felt a different man as he'd done it. The person he believed himself to be up until the last summer of his life – quiet, contemplative, cool-headed – would have never taken such a foolish risk. Even Nathaniel, blinded by the smoke of his heart, on fire for Cora Munro, had made sure he and their father were at his back during the Huron ambush. But even knowing that he had out-dared his brother in that fatal hour, Uncas could not summon any self-recrimination. His hands should have been faster, his guard keener, but running up the promontory, alone…it had been natural. Inevitable.

Why was he here then, with Alice Munro's ribbon held between two fingers?

 _No._ To even think the words would break him. But the thoughts simmered like a pot to the fire.

It wasn't as Uncas had imagined it would be. It wasn't an all-consuming passion, it wasn't madness – it was a quiet, soft thing, sharp-edged as a small white river rock. It lived in peace with Uncas' sense of honor, with his determination and his loyalty, so much that he was sure his brother and his father would have never noticed it was there. The single casualty in this entire mess – because here at the end of all things, Uncas could recognize it had been a mess, and a mess it would have remained if he lived – had been his caution.

He had little to compare it with. He had known other woman, but his visions of the future had been simple and sober. To hunt. To run. To have Nathaniel and his father close at hand.

Those had been his only dreams, until –

\- until he had held the shivering, fragile form of an English girl and knew a yearning that went far and beyond the needs of his body and the dreams of his childhood. He had given her comfort, even as he realized she could not give him any back…because, even if the best were to happen, Alice Munro would leave, and even though Uncas would return to the life he knew, nothing would ever be the same again.

Silence, like a softly scented herbal compress, spread over Uncas' chest. He stroked the length of the ribbon once, and could almost pretend a long strand of golden hair had clung to some part of it.

"I…" Uncas was a man of few words. Without company, or in the company of those who could read him best, he had little trouble forgoing words for hours at a time. But this one thing demanded it of him. As it had demanded of him from the moment he'd truly seen Alice Munro. "I…I love Alice Munro."

The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, waves in the water. When they vanished, something changed in the air. Uncas rose to his feet in shock: the great roots were gone.

No sound had warned him, no movement. The tree had been there, and then he wasn't anywhere. All the obstacles were gone.

* * *

He was at the other side of the door in a moment, and found that nothing had changed there, at least: Mamèthakemu still pointed, still looked vacant. The light was still faint and strange, the walls of this Other Cabin still distant. Uncas wet his lips, which weren't dry despite the gesture. "Mamèthakemu."

The figure in front of him didn't react, not at once. Then she slowly lowered her hand and turned, beginning to walk away.

"Mamèthakemu…why were you calling me?"

Mamèthakemu stopped, and Uncas followed suit. She turned, setting bland eyes on Uncas again, and lifted her arms slowly, as if each weighed a ton.

 _Uncas…_ the whisper sounded farther away now. It had never come from Mamethakemu at all.

"It was not you."

Mamèthakemu shook her head, and for the first time, her features shifted. She blinked, and regarded Uncas with a gentle, unmeasurable sorrow.

A sudden brightness made him turn: on a wall that had not been there before, immediately behind Mamèthakemu, a line of bright light appeared, as if someone were drawing it vertically across. Then it blossomed into a square of light, and Uncas saw movement.

It was Alice. She walked the halls of a place like Fort William Henry, her eyes like eyes wide and frightened, mouth panting like when they'd met, converging on the George Road after a hint that their father had found as they were heading west. Her long hair was loose, and she wore the just-slightly-too big dress she'd been wearing the last time he'd seen her. Uncas...the voice was Alice's voice, a gentle whisper he couldn't believe he hand't placed before. Her lips didn't move. But the whisper, somehow, came from her.

"Alice…" Even as he called her, Uncas knew she wouldn't hear him. As Alice paused, aggrieved, the image vanished like smoke from a burnt-out candle.

Mamèthakemu's eyes met his, but Uncas, overcome by a sudden distaste at this creature who was not human, threw himself back and away from the shape, feeling the despair that had flooded him recede away like he was rising out of a lake, fast replaced by something fiercer. Dimly, he realized he was panting now too.

"What…why is she…"

A line of something bright crossed Mamèthakemu's cheek - a tear. And Uncas knew, as his spine curved and his chin met his chest. He  _knew_.

The specter that looked like Mamèthakemu must have dissolved into the air. The cavernous Other Cabin must have probably done the same, perhaps vanishing without a trace or a sound like the trees in the tiny room where he'd found three crucial items. But Uncas lost all awareness of everything but his sorrow until a gasp and a clatter of footsteps told him he was with John Cameron again.

"Uncas!" The clatter approached his ear, and familiar hands where at his shoulder. "How d'you do that? The mass of trees, it just vanished –"

"She is dead, John." No tears had come, but Uncas' voice was tight.

"Wha – who?"

"Alice Munro. She is dead." Dead, alone and lost. Uncas had failed.


End file.
